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November 13, 2010Sweet Suicide : How sugar ruins your health
November 6, 2010Sweet Suicide is a 60-minute documentary produced in 2009 by Nancy Appleton, PhD, about the health dangers of sugar. Sugar is one radial drug says Chiropractor in Denver,CO Dr. Jeffrey Parham.
Amazing Spinal Flexibility You Must See
November 6, 2010Spinal flexibility is important for health and wellness. Watch this amazing video to learn the secrets of spinal flexibility. Warning: Don’t try this at home.
Outer Beauty Begins With Inner Connection
October 30, 2010People who are connected feel more deeply and experience more profoundly. They find it easier to release the tension, stress and nerve disturbances… read more at the Denver Chiropractic Blog
What Monsanto’s fall from grace reveals about the GMO seed industry
October 24, 2010Interesting how the truth always seems to come out one way or the other. Denver Chiropractor
I got caught up in a cyclone of travel, meetings, and speechifying the last two weeks, so I’m a bit behind on the latest news in the food world. But I did take note of Andrew Pollack’s Oct. 4 New York Times story on the recent plight of genetically modified (GM) seed giant Monsanto, long-time Wall Street darling and bête noire of the sustainable food movement.Pollack summed up Monsanto’s woes like this:
As recently as late December, Monsanto was named “company of the year” by Forbes magazine. Last week, the company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television stock market commentator. “This may be the worst stock of 2010,” he proclaimed.
On Tuesday, Forbes publicly lamented its decision to deem Monsanto “company of the year.” The headline was cutting: “Forbes was wrong about Monsanto. Really wrong.” How did Monsanto go from Wall Street hero to Wall Street doormat?
According to The Times’ Pollack, Monsanto’s troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent on Roundup, Monsanto’s market-dominating herbicide, has run out, exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2) its target audience — large-scale commodity farmers in the south and Midwest — are turning against its core offerings in genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.
I agree with Pollack’s diagnosis, but I want to add a third and even more fundamental problem to the mix: Monsanto’s once-celebrated product pipeline is looking empty. As I’ll show below, its current whiz-bang seeds offer just tarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for more than a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile, judging from the company’s recent report on its latest quarterly earnings, the “blockbuster” traits it has been promising for years — drought resistance and nitrogen-use efficiency — don’t seem to be coming along very well.
Why do I say that? In my days as a reporter covering the stock market, I read a lot of company financial reports. When a high-tech company like Monsanto disappointed Wall Street analysts with its financial performance, it would strain to draw attention to “next-generation” products that promised huge future returns to investors. But in its report on its disappointing quarter last week, Monsanto did no such thing. It gave zero details about next-generation seeds, and instead focused on its “revamped pricing approach.” Translated, that means that after years of constantly jacking up prices, the company is being forced to slash them to keep farmers interested. The loss of pricing clout is devastating for a high-tech company like Monsanto.
What gives? Why is the company that once ruled the Big Ag universe like Darth Vader now whimpering like a mouse?
Stuck in the mud
As Pollack delicately puts it, Monsanto “has been buffeted by setbacks this year.” The most famous one is the rise of Roundup-resistant “superweeds,” first in the south and then in the Corn Belt, that has forced thousands of farmers to reconsider the merits of Monsanto’s flagship Roundup Ready crop varieties.
Monsanto’s response has been to roll out its much-ballyhooed SmartStax corn seed, “stacked” with a mind-boggling eight foreign genes. Colluding with its arch-rival Dow AgroSciences — whatever happened to antitrust, again? — Monsanto loaded the new wonder-seed with multiple varieties of the toxic gene from Bt, a naturally occurring bacteria that had been used as a pesticide for years before Monsanto came along. Each of the Bt varieties in SmartStax targets a specific insect. To address the problem of Roundup-resistant “superweeds,” the SmartStax seed combines Monsanto’s Roundup Ready trait with Dow’s trait for resistance to its own proprietary herbicide, Liberty. Now corn farmers can douse their fields freely with not one but two broad-spectrum herbicides!
In a press release heralding the advent of SmartStax when it was still in development back in 2007, a Monsanto exec expressed the company’s hopes and dreams for the new product:
“By bringing together the two companies that have developed and commercialized the trait technologies widely used in agriculture today, we can provide farmers an ‘all-in-one’ answer to demands for comprehensive yield protection from weed and insect threats,” said Carl Casale, executive vice president of strategy and operations for Monsanto. “Farmers will have more product choices to optimize performance and protection, and that translates into a higher-yielding opportunity and a new growth proposition for their businesses and ours.”
But as I say above, SmartStax is just a mashup of various forms of the only two traits Monsanto has ever brought to market: herbicide tolerance and Bt toxicity.
And unfortunately for Monsanto and its once fat-and-happy shareholders, SmartStax corn is starting to look, well, not so smart. According to The Times’ Pollack, early data from this year’s corn harvest suggest that SmartStax is “providing yields no higher than the company’s less expensive corn, which contains only three foreign genes.” As a result, the company is having to slash prices on both SmartStax and its new soybean seed, cleverly called Roundup Ready 2 Yield. Oops.
The evident failure of SmartStax to deliver yield gains may be the straw that crushes Monsanto’s long-time claim that its products offer farmers dramatically higher yields than do conventional seeds. In a 2009 paper called “Failure to Yield,” Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, showed that since their public debut in 1996, GM traits have actually provided, at best, marginal yield gains — and in fact in some cases have caused yields to decrease.
So why is Monsanto merely rearranging and stacking up last year’s traits, and not rolling out new ones?
Tough row to hoe
Here’s what I think, from years of listening to industry critics like Gurian-Sherman and the Center for Food Safety’s Andrew Kimbrell: It is one thing to splice a particular trait like herbicide or pesticide resistance into the corn genome. You isolate the gene in an organism like Bt that kills insects, splice it into the corn genome, and watch it express itself.
But transforming a crop’s way of taking up water and fertilizer — the goal of engineering crops that can withstand drought and use nitrogen more efficiently — is infinitely more complex. These intricate processes developed through millions of years of evolution. They don’t involve a single gene, but rather groups of genes interacting in ways that are little understood. And as the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Gurian-Sherman told me in an interview, in the process of achieving a complex trait like drought resistance, breeders often generate unintended traits, such as susceptibility to disease. These are known as “pleiotropic effects” — simply the idea that changing one aspect of a thing can create multiple, unpredictable effects. Pleiotropy is the scourge of GMO breeders looking to create the next generation of miracle transgenic seeds.
In his 2009 paper No Sure Fix [PDF], Gurian-Sherman shows that attempts to create nitrogen-efficient GM seeds that actually work well in the field have so far failed — and that conventional breeders have actually managed to generate significant gains in nitrogen-use efficiency in the field without resorting to transgenic methods.
In his Times piece, Andrew Pollack reports that Monsanto “hopes” to introduce another complex trait, drought-tolerance in corn, sometime in 2012. My experience as a business reporter tells me that if Monsanto execs were confident in their ability to do so, they would have trumpeted it in their dismal recent quarterly report.
From my perspective, what we’re seeing is signs that GMO technology is much cruder and less effective than its champions have let on. After decades of hype and billions of dollars worth of research, much of it publicly funded, the industry has managed to market exactly two traits. More devastating still, it has failed on its own terms: it has not delivered the promised dazzling yield gains.
As Monsanto execs scramble to win back their mojo with Wall Street investors — the lot that brought us the dot-com and housing busts in the past decade alone — the rest of us would do well to remember that the surest path to a bountiful future lies in supporting biodiversity, not in narrowing it away by handing the globe’s seed heritage to a few bumbling companies.
via pheedcontent.com
Why and How
October 24, 2010http://jparham.healthnewspodcast.info/wp-content/mu-plugins/audio-player/player.swf
Oct 19 2010
Why and How
Here is your Health & Lifestyle Tip of the Week provided by Dr. Jeffrey E. Parham.
It almost seems too good to be true, but these little messages about diet, nutrition, wellness and exercise will have a profound effect on you and your family.
When you think health think Wellness Rhythms at 303-722-1104.
Boosting Your Immune System For Vibrant Health
October 20, 2010The community forum ” Boosting Your Immune System For Vibrant Health” last evening with Dr. Jeffrey Parham at Wellness Rhythms was well attended. This iw number one in our ” How Staying Healthy Can Make You Rich Series”. In community thoughts, ideas and wisdom around health and wellness were shared for the greater good of all attending!
As I mentioned during class the reason I got on this subject is because of the frustration I feel about all the mis and disinformation in the area of food, nutrition and the role of the nervous system in health. It’s about time the truth is known about food, nutrition and function of the nerve system for the health and wellness of all!
Scott Smith, a Wellness Rhythms’ Practice Member, shared wisdom gathered from his 24 years in the nutritional supplement field.We all learned from Scott and I’m thankful he attended.
Some people asked that I post the notes from Boosting Your Immune System For Vibrant Health and you’ll find them below. And remember there’s freedom in a health spine!
Please share, tweet and “like’ this article with your friends and family.
Best Foods for A Healthy Immune System
1- Unpasteurized Grass-Fed Organic Milk (raw goat milk products also)
list of sources at The Raw Milk Association of Colorado
2- Whey Protein from Unpasteurized Grass-Fed Organic Milk
3. Raw Organic Eggs from Free-Range Chickens
4. Grass-Fed Beef or Organ Meats
5. Coconuts and Coconut Oil and Brown Rice Bran Oil – both great for cooking or raw
6. Locally Grown Organic Vegetables
7. Blueberries and Raspberries (don’t forget pomegranate juice)
8. Mushrooms, Turkey Tail, Maitake, Shlitake, Reishi
9. Chlorella – green algae
10. Propolis – obtained from beehives and contains bee products.
11. Teas
Green Tea and Matcha, Tulsi
12. Herbs and Spices
Garlic- fresh, Turmeric, cloves, Black Pepper, Oregano
Bonus SectionSupplements
Vit D3, Vit K2, Vit E, antioxidants, multi vitamin, multi mineralFermented Foods
especially soy productsUse Krill oil instead of fish oil for omega 3
15 minutes of sunshine per day to aid vit D3 production
30 minutes a day of continous walking reduces stress and decreases chance of heart deasease by 50%.
Drink half you body weight in ounces of spring or filtered water per day.
Make sure your spine is aligned and your nervous system is functioning at 100%. Have your spine checked by Dr. Parham.
Foodstuff To Avoid
1-Sugar
Nancy Appleton, Ph.D.
Author of LICK THE SUGAR HABIT
141 Ways Sugar Ruins Your Health2- Reduce or avoid processed foods, grains and sugar
3- Avoid non fermented Soy. For info read this post.
4- Avoid processed salt. Use sea salt instead.
5- Reduce or eliminate alcohol
6- Avoid using vegetable oils, soy oil, canola oil, etc. Read labels for more info.
Tags: Denver Chiropractor, wellness
This entry was posted on October 20, 2010 at 10:51 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted in Denver Chiropractor Health Tips Wellness Rhythms Events by admin No Comments Yet
Raw Cheese Ordered Destroyed—With No Evidence of Contamination
October 20, 2010
After a shockingly violent FDA raid on a food co-op, the FDA’s war on raw milk and cheese continues by forcing a family dairy to destroy $250,000 worth of its product.
As we wrote a few months ago, the FDA is continuing an aggressive campaign of harassment and legal intimidation meant to eliminate raw milk products. The latest attack began July 30 with the Rawsome Raid, where a closed-circuit video shows gun-toting FDA agents storming a raw foods co-op in Venice, CA, ordering everyone in the store up against a wall and frisking them, then filling seventeen unrefrigerated coolers with items such as raw milk, raw honey, and raw cane syrup. (“I still can’t believe they took our yogurt,” said one Rawsome volunteer. “There’s a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they’re raiding us because we’re selling raw dairy products?”)
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) was assigned to do lab tests of all the seized food, which they did—seven weeks later, though no samples were sent to the various cheese producers for independent testing as required by FDA regulations. No one seems to know how the foods were handled, or whether they were cooled properly, in the seven weeks between the confiscation and the testing. A press release issued by CDFA saying its lab “detected” Listeria monocytogenes in two varieties of raw-milk cheese from a family farm in Missouri called Morningland Dairy.
Morningland Dairy immediately recalled 68,957 pounds of raw-milk cheese (made with cows’ milk and goats’ milk), even though the FDA acknowledged that no one had become ill from eating the cheese. The FDA, together with the Missouri Milk Board, wanted to determine the source of the infection, so the FDA tested their plant thoroughly. On September 14, the dairy received a verbal declaration from an FDA official that all swabs used to test their cheese plant and their milk barn came back negative (i.e., clean). Three days later, two FDA officials closed that investigation.
Suddenly, on September 27, Morningland received a “destroy all” order from the Missouri Milk Board. They had to destroy all their cheese, even though the cheese stock had never been tested or found to be contaminated. This is nearly 50,000 pounds of cheese, worth approximately $250,000.
Note that the only thing the FDA raiders could complain about following the Rawsome Raid was two allegedly contaminated packets of Morningland cheese, tested seven weeks after confiscation, after having been left who-knows-where all that time. If the FDA really doubts the health of Morningland cheese, the agency should test the cheese at the dairy, as the dairy owners suggest. But no: branding Morningland as dangerous purveyors of raw milk products is the only way FDA can justify the outrageous behavior of its Gestapo-like raid.
According to the Raw Milk Cheese Association, FDA regulations say the cheese produced from raw milk—that is, milk not heated above 104 degrees—shall be aged for 60 days or longer at a temperature of not less than 35°F. (The 60-day clause goes back to the 1940s.) So does aging kill bacteria or not? If it does, as FDA regulations would indicate, and if the FDA’s own tests found no bacteria at the dairy in question, then might we not conclude that the bacteria grew because the FDA placed the cheese in unrefrigerated coolers, with no record of how it was stored, until it was tested seven weeks later?
The media is raising the profile of the raw milk debate. As a recent Time magazine cover story on raw milk points out, advocates question why this age-old product is under such unrelenting government attack while the practices of vast feedlots and food processors are not. Scott Trautman, a Wisconsin farmer who lost his only corporate customer last year because he was selling raw milk on the side, believes the crackdown on raw-milk microdairies is essentially a way for Big Dairy to eliminate the competition. Megacorporations are “going to pick up these farms for 10 cents on the dollar,” he says. “That’s the endgame in all this.”
Friends of Morningland have put up a website, The Uncheese Party. They are asking supporters to sponsor a cheese to help the family meet its large legal bills and loss of sales.
via anh-usa.org
Is going raw really a crime? Your honor “we the sheep people have found the defendant Big Brother…well we really can’t decide”
drjeffrey@wellnessrhythms.com has shared: Dr. Jeffrey Parham Health and Wellness Weekly News Update | Why and How
October 20, 2010| Dr. Jeffrey Parham Health and Wellness Weekly News Update | Why and How Source: jparham.healthnewspodcast.info |
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drjeffrey@wellnessrhythms.com sent this using ShareThis.
This a must attend event and you’re invited!
October 11, 2010First Annual Practice Member Appreciation Day at Wellness Rhythms
Denver Chiropractor Dr. Jeffrey Parham invites you to a day of celebration and appreciation for the Wellness Rhythms Practice Member. Guests and family are welcome. Join the Wellness Rhythms community for live music, food, giveaways. From 2 PM until 4 PM Saturday Oct 16th at Wellness Rhythms located at 184 S. Pennsylvania St, Denver 80209. Live music by Kate Leroux http://www.kateleroux.com and Greg McGregor http://rickmcgregormusic.com
Don’t miss this event! Please RSVP with Dawn at wellness@wellnessrhythms.com
Tags: Denver Chiropractor, dr. jeffrey parham, wellness
This entry was posted on October 11, 2010 at 6:39 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted in Chiropractor Denver Wellness Rhythms Events by admin No Comments Yet
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